As instructed, I take the elevator down and walk out into the humid night, then make my way down to the empty flower bed. An hour passes. Dad doesn’t come for me. I have no change for a pay phone. The hospital doors are locked. Standing under the humming streetlight, I watch the cars roar past; I’m fighting tears, afraid to do anything, until my father finally drives up sometime after eleven. He tells me he’s been on a house call (his all-purpose answer for every late arrival, one that is never questioned). For some reason, though, I don’t believe him this time. Something in his voice, or maybe his averted eyes, tells me that he’s lying. This realization terrifies me. From this moment forward, some part of me knows I cannot completely trust my father. I know only this: My mother would never have left me alone beside the highway with no idea where to go or what to do.
As the years passed, no similar incident occurred, yet this one stayed with me. Something about that night opened the door to a darkness that less fortunate children lived with every day and night: the horror of abandonment. And now … thirty-seven years later, the terror of that night has returned with paralyzing intensity. Though all the years since have reinforced the belief that my father is the paragon of virtue everyone believes he is, my certainty about that deception remains clear. Why did he lie that night? Where had he been?
“I was eight,” I murmur, rubbing my arms to stay warm. “That means it was 1968. Spring or summer of sixty-eight.”
The year Viola Turner left Natchez, I realize. What month did she leave? April? Yes … soon after Martin Luther King was killed.
My mind returns to the friend who broke his legs on the motorcycle. He lives on the West Coast now; I haven’t seen him for years. Surely he would remember when he was hurt, and how long he was in the hospital. That accident changed his life. But do I really need to call him? One thing I remember for sure: his stay in the hospital caused him to miss weeks of school. So it wasn’t summertime. Nor was it cold outside, while I waited for my dad. It had to be … spring. The spring of 1968.
“Jesus,” I whisper, realizing what this might mean.
Last night Dad denied the possibility that he could be Lincoln Turner’s father. I took this denial as an assertion that he’d never slept with Viola. But was it? He also told me that his only connection to Brody Royal had been incidental, and that the photo of them together had been a fluke.
“What if he was lying?” I murmur. “And not just about Viola, but all of it? About Royal, Leland Robb … all of it?”
The wind snatches away my words, but not before they open a chasm at my feet. I feel that if I take one step forward, I’ll tumble into a blackness that has no bottom. What now? Should I track down my father and try to shake the truth out of him? What would be the point? If he lied last night, he’ll only lie again today. I could question my mother, but that would only rip open a chasm at her feet, and force her to ponder the possibility that her life isn’t what she’s always believed it to be. I can hardly imagine a more painful or pointless course of action.
As I stand frozen in the doorway, another voice rises in my mind. It’s not mine, or my father’s, or any other that I’ve heard in a long time. This voice is soft and feminine, yet filled with conviction. It belongs to my wife, Sarah, dead seven years now. She has spoken to me only in times of great travail, and then almost too softly to hear. But tonight her words come clear to me: If you want the truth … you know what to do.
“I don’t,” I say to the empty street, wondering if I’m going mad.
Do what you do best, she says.
“What’s that?” I mutter.
Solve the crime.
AROUND THE BLOCK FROM Shad’s office, in the City Hall parking lot, I climb into my Audi and start the engine, my heart pounding from the run from Shad’s office. All the way around the block, my wife’s voice echoed like a mantra in my head: Solve the crime, solve the crime …
The preliminary autopsy report Jewel Washington passed to me (in violation of the law) lies on the passenger seat beside me. I analyzed hundreds of such documents during my years as an assistant DA, but right now I can’t bring myself to wade through a pathologist’s report. That work is more suited to the deep of the night, when no interruptions will break my concentration. Besides, that report can only tell me so much. Without access to the crime scene evidence—all of it—I can only make deductions based on part of the picture, and that’s asking for trouble. Beyond this, all my instinct tells me that Viola’s murder won’t be solved by deconstructing the crime, Sherlock Holmes–style. In fact, I believe I already know who actually robbed Viola of her last few days of life. According to Henry Sexton, Glenn Morehouse believed that his Double Eagle comrades murdered Viola, to bury her knowledge about the murders of her brother and Luther Davis. But the murder of Jimmy Revels was actually ordered by Brody Royal, in an effort carry out the will of Carlos Marcello, who wanted Bobby Kennedy dead before he could be elected president. Though that plot was ultimately aborted—due to the accidental death of Frank Knox—Jimmy and Luther were killed and “disappeared” to obliterate all trace of the plan. How much could Viola have known about any of that? According to Morehouse, Viola was held prisoner in the machine shop where and while her brother and Luther were tortured, but by then the RFK hit had been canceled. Is it possible that Snake Knox and his buddies—knowing they were about to kill Jimmy, Luther, and Viola—spoke freely about Royal and Marcello’s planned operation in front of their prisoners?
No. If they had, they’d never have let Viola live, no matter what my father promised them in return.
As I ponder this paradox, I realize how little the Double Eagles interest me. Their motive for murder was one-dimensional. There’s no mystery in atavistic racism. But the Double Eagles almost never operated autonomously. Even before Frank Knox died, they took their cues from Brody Royal. It was Brody who wanted Pooky Wilson dead (for consorting with his daughter), and Brody who authorized killing Albert Norris. It was Brody Royal who lifted Frank Knox out of his drunken grief to try to lure Bobby Kennedy into Carlos Marcello’s sights, and Royal who ordered Snake Knox to make sure Dr. Leland Robb’s plane never reached its destination three years later.